The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl

Martin Creed
Works
This publication presents a long overdue survey of the complete works of Martin Creed. Reproducing every one of his
more than 600 works, this extensive volume offers the first comprehensive survey of his artistic career. Creed’s
sculptures, installations and drawings come from the objects, works, and sounds of everyday life. Constantly searching
for the essential nature of things, he uses the simplest materials to create a world in which obsessions and fantasies
radically alter reality and transform it into a catalogue of rigid rules and unexpected exceptions. His work is
simultaneously spectacular and subtle, playful and severe, at times almost cruel in its stark dryness. Creed’s pieces are
characterised by their economy of means and site specificity. This awareness of context and the role of the viewer leads
to a variety of unexpected artistic propositions: a protrusion from the wall, a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, a door
opening and closing, the lights going on and off, or a soundtrack inside a moving lift. His works do not have titles.
Instead, they have inventory numbers and include fragments of text which have a pragmatic function as a basic,
comprehensive description, transcription or instruction. As Creed explains: “I started numbering my works because I
wasn't happy with titles made of words. They meant too much and added too much extra, and I wanted a way of
treating everything the same, big or small, whatever it was made of, whatever it was. Using numbers – just like
catalogue numbers – seemed a good way of doing this. All numbers are equal. When I started numbering my works I
went back and gave numbers to old ones. I got quite self-conscious about it – about which numbers I gave to which
works – and found that I didn’t want to have a ‘Work No.1.’ It was too much. I couldn’t live with it. WORK NO. 1, MY
FIRST WORK! NO WAY! The point of the numbering was to try to give all works the same value – to treat everything
the same – but the number one just was not the same. Not all numbers are equal. And so I tried to make a kind of fadein.
I started with 3, put 5 next, and went on up from there.”
Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England in 1968, and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. He has exhibited
extensively worldwide, and in 2001 won the Tate’s Turner Prize for his Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. This
last year has seen him touring with his Variety Show, a theatrical production which combines words, music and dance
– including performances in London, New York and Christchurch, New Zealand. Following his solo show in London at
Hauser & Wirth Coppermill and a solo survey show at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Creed had a solo
show at Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in Fall 2007. Martin Creed has been invited to create this year’s Duveens
Commission at Tate Britain. He lives and works in London and Alicudi, Italy.
Martin Creed
Works
PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED
Essays by Germaine Greer, Matthew Higgs, Barry Humphries,
Darian Leader and John O’Reilly
Book design by Martin Creed, Catherine Lutman and Michael Mack
800 pages with 600 color plates
7.3 x 10.2 in./18.5 x 26 cm
Embossed hardback
US$100.00/£50.00/€70.00
ISBN 978-3-86521-408-9
187